From the Desk of the Bookkeeper in Derby
Over time changes and indeed advances to the way we operate become an essential part of any business - not least within the bookkeeping fraternity. For those of us who have already started on the journey of being self employed you will know exactly what I am alluding to.
Those first tentative steps of trying to keep tabs on daily expenses - usually in a notebook or for the very brave an excel spreadsheet - then branching out into something a little more formal - The Little Yellow Book of Accounting for the Terrified is highly recommended.... then a couple of month/years pass and we find the need for an online solution and can't quite commit to a monthly fee so for those there is the natural progression into Solar Accounts.
Then the day arrives - usually after a few months of agony and drowning under a sea of paper and very very late nights and early mornings then the driving need is to move to something a little more robust.
You are then faced with a question of landlocked or satellite?
Well, as a sole operator - QuickBooks performed admirably - although there was a time when an update corrupted on of my clients data. Horrible. Wouldn't have been so bad - but I was a few days away from submitting their VAT return. The pain lives with me still.
But as the team grows we needed to apply one of the most rudiment of all data entry principles - ONE DATA SOURCE.
I'd looked at Xero in its early stages and wasn't so impressed - however time has improved this accounting package. So last August we took the plunge and began migrating client data over to Xero. It was an ambitious plan - but we, as a team have grown and learned and as we face our first set of Year Ends - one of Xero's major advantageous is that we can have several people working on the same account at the same time.
Having said that - Xero isn't QuickBooks and I really miss a lot of the reporting functionality that is available. I suspect though that it is only a matter of time before the Xero team begin to realise that the putting the raw data in is only a fraction of what is required of any accounting system... at the end of the day - unless you can run interactive reports - any system is worse than useless.
BKD
